There was this person who was expounding on the upcoming election and why he wasn’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton. It was his first time voting, you see, and he wanted someone who understood and represented his generation.

He said to me, “You don’t understand – ”

And that’s where I had to stop him. “Look, I do understand. Really.”

“How can you understand? You’re too old.”

“Do you think I was born old? Y'know, I have pictures. Here’s me at thirteen – ”

“But times were different then – ”

“Yes, they were. You could get polio and measles and smallpox. An appendectomy was a serious operation. People smoked everywhere, there was no getting away from the smoke. In school, they taught us to duck and cover in case of a nuclear attack. Whites and blacks still had separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Women couldn’t get a legal abortion. Gas had lead in it. Vegetables were sprayed with DDT. You could be arrested for being gay. Yes, times were different.”

“No, I meant that protesting was a fad, not serious like – ”

“Excuse me? Do you want to see the scar on my scalp where I was hit by a thrown bottle at the first gay rights march? We also had civil rights demonstrations, anti-war marches, and rallies for women’s rights as well. That was no fad. People were dying – ”

“No, look, man – it’s the establishment. That’s what’s wrong – ”

“And you want to replace the establishment with what? A different establishment? Listen – when I was your age, when my generation was your age, we were just as frustrated and just as impatient as you are now. Honest. Am I saying we were wrong? Hell, no. We were right. Better than that, we were so right, we were self-righteous. We went around saying, ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30,’ as if somehow when you turned 30, you became one of them. Y'know?

"You know what we missed? We missed the obvious – that there were a lot of good men and women over 30 who understood the issues, and the complexities of the situation better than we did – because they’d been fighting that fight for a lot longer. We had emotion, we had energy, we had spirit – but we didn’t have enough experience, enough history, enough of everything we needed to effect real change.

"So we didn’t turn out for Hubert Humphrey and we handed the country to Richard Nixon. And a generation later, other people didn’t turn out for Al Gore and handed the country to George W. Bush. And what was missed – both times – was the fact our impatience was the single biggest mistake we could make.

"Hubert Humphrey had experience, he had wisdom, and he shared our goals. Al Gore had experience, he had wisdom, and he shared our goals. But somewhere, enough of us decided that he was too old or too much of the establishment or didn’t really represent us enough, or would just give us more of the same when what we really wanted was more, better, and different, even if we couldn’t define it – enough of us felt that way to hand the presidency to a much worse administration.

"So, no – it isn’t that you’re wrong. It’s that there are people who’ve been down this path before. We know where it leads. And it’s not a good place. We know what this mistake looks like. Because we’ve made it ourselves – and we’re asking you not to make the same mistakes we did, because each time we make this mistake, everyone gets hurt.”

And he said, “So that’s a fancy way of saying 'suck it up, buttercup, you can’t have what you want.”

And I said, “No, but if that’s the way you want to hear it, then that’s the way you’re going to hear it. The way government works, nobody gets everything they want. The way government is supposed to work, everybody negotiates – and eventually everybody gets a piece of what they need to keep going. Nobody likes that, but consider what the alternative is – if some people get everything they want, that means a lot of people are going to get nothing at all. We keep trying that, it doesn’t work. Let’s go back to the stuff that does work.”

“But I don’t like her – ”

“I’m not asking you to like her. I’m asking you to respect that she knows how to do the job. He doesn’t. You can have your protest vote, that’s your right, but that’s letting everybody else decide who gets the oval office. And you might want to think long and hard about which of the two will build on what President Obama has accomplished and which of the two will tear it all down with no idea of why it worked in the first place. Your choice.”

And he said, “That’s not much of a choice.”

And I said, “The hell it isn’t. It’s a choice between experience and ignorance. That’s the clearest choice I’ve ever seen in an election.”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

And that’s the point –

'I might be old, but I’m not stupid. And I suspect that a lot of other members of my generation feel the same way. We remember when we were impatient. And we remember the mistakes that our impatience created.

“Old people don’t tell young people what to do and what not to do because we want to control your lives – we just want to warn you not to make the same mistakes we did.

[TWEET: @ryan_marsh: Can confirm. As a combat vet this is maddening. #BlackLivesMatter]

appetitusinvictus: “I was in Iraq and even in an actual theater of war, unless you were immediately fired on, we had several steps to go through before kill shots. We had rules of engagement and escalation of force cards my command made us carry on us at all times with those regulations.

Even when a car possibly carrying explosives was barreling down on us, we were taught to exhaust several steps of warnings before killing: hand signals, flags, pop smoke/flares, warning shots to the sides, disabling shots THEN kill shots.

So for the life of me I can’t figure out why on the streets in the United States of America, police officers go immediately to murder and people are just like ‘Well, in the heat of the moment…’”

Honestly something that bothers me more than most things is having my compassion mistaken for naivety.

I know that another fish might eat this bullfrog right after I spend months rehabilitating it.

I know that turning a beetle back onto its legs won’t save it from falling over again when I walk away.

I know that there is no cosmic reward waiting for my soul based on how many worms I pick off a hot sidewalk to put into the mud, or how many times I’ve helped a a raccoon climb out of a too-deep trashcan.

I know things suffer, and things struggle, and things die uselessly all day long. I’m young and idealistic, but I’m not literally a child. I would never judge another person for walking by an injured bird, for ignoring a worm, or for not really caring about the fate of a frog in a pond full of, y’know, plenty of other frogs.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But I cannot cannot cannot look at something struggling and ignore it if I may have the power to help.

There is so much bad stuff in this world so far beyond my control, that I take comfort in the smallest, most thankless tasks. It’s a relief to say “I can help you in this moment,” even though they don’t understand.

I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me another fish probably ate that frog when I let it go, or that the raccoon probably ended up trapped in another dumpster the next night.

I know!!!! I know!!!!!!! But today I had the power to help! So I did! And it made me happy!

I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?

More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.

The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.

Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.

Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this– first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.

The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.

This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.

This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown.

In 1847 during the Irish potato famine, the Choctaw Nation of Native Americans donated $147 to assist with famine relief. An Irish town built a memorial to thank Native Americans. (source)

Good guy Choctaws

According to Wikipedia it was actually $710 and when you adjust for inflation it makes just under $20,000. I’ve heard people making fun of this like it was some crappy amount of money that they donated but it was a pretty big deal.

^^^^^

Look listen did you know we aren’t taught about this in school??? In Northern Ireland where I live?? We’re taught about the famine and how many Irish people died and why and how many went to America etc but we are NOT taught that a) the English REFUSED to give aid and in fact TOOK MORE FOOD and that b) Native Americans sent money AND grain!! To a country they weren’t even close to! That they’d barely even heard of!! Why aren’t we taught this? (I fucking know why)

Oxford Dictionary is under fire after Michael Oman-Reagan, an anthropologist and Ph.D. candidate, pointed out these instances of sexist example sentences accompanying words like “rabid” and “shrill.” At first, Oxford Dictionaries responded with the above flippant tweet — but later apologized and vowed to change at least one of the words.

WOW this is so not okay

This is what we mean when we talk about invisible sexism. Each of these makes perfect sense to most people, fits perfectly with our social context and our cultural worldview. Only when they’re put together do you see the pattern all at once and go “oh…yeah that’s actually kinda fucked up, isn’t it?” Because tiny, invisible things create a cultural context which builds into an overall attitude of mocking, minimizing, and dismissiveness towards a full half of the population.

This is also a good example of why “but the dictionary says-” isn’t a valid argument when discussing racism, sexism, etc.

YES! And ​this is precisely
the
same thing language does with colorism and anti-blackness. Our language has sexism and racism embedded in it, and quietly teaches us to associate negative qualities with non-male and non-white people. Sexism and colorism become normalized in common, everyday euphemisms to the point we often don’t even “see” it - hence the “invisible” part of invisible sexism. Language is extremely pernicious (and effective) in this regard.

It is just unconscionable that this could be allowed to happen and all I hear in national news outlets is about well off folks some billionaires trying to gain more power.
Clean water is a basic human right! It’s a damn shame some go without. #Hate it!

Short version: his girlfriend quietly left him, has a lawyer call him and tell him he has 45 days to pack up and move out; she paid the deposit on the place, the lease was in her name, he says they’ve been sharing the bills, and she’s offered to pay the last bit of rent until he’s gone. But she wants no contact with him, has moved all her stuff out, hasn’t told him where she has gone, and has blocked phone contact. He’s baffled about why, and wonders if she can really do all that.

Along the way he casually mentions that he’d hit her in a domestic dispute a few years before, and that they’d recently had an argument in which the police were called. He downplays these events, but it seems to me that such a thorough, calm, and well-planned departure was probably a rational response to abuse. He writes as if he’s the victim here.

He’s the sole source of information, and even he can’t twist the facts to exonerate himself, which tells me he has to be far worse than he lets on. And his ex-girlfriend? She’s brilliant. It’s a textbook example of how to terminate an abusive relationship, if you have the financial resources (that’s a key modifier: abusers often force dependency, this woman was lucky her boyfriend was a slacker).

Drag queen, artist and chameleon extraordinaire Phi Phi O'Hara is chronicling her #365DaysOfDrag project on Instagram. As part of the year-long project, O'Hara limited her subject matter for a time to iconic cartoon characters of the ‘90s — and they are amazing.

Artist Daan Roosegaarde has created an incredibly beautiful tribute to Vincent van Gogh, an illuminated bike path that glows in the dark. Located in the Netherlands, the path is illuminated by thousands of twinkling stones that feature glow-in-the-dark technology and solar-powered LED lights. (Source)